Locality domains and morphological rules: Phases, heads, node-sprouting and suppletion in Korean honorification

Abstract

Korean subject honorification and Korean negation have both affixal and suppletive exponents. In addition, Korean negation has a periphrastic realization involving an auxiliary verb. By examining their interaction, we motivate several hypotheses concerning locality constraints on the conditioning of suppletion and the insertion of dissociated morphemes (‘node-sprouting’). At the same time, we come to a better understanding of the nature of Korean subject honorification. We show that Korean honorific morphemes are ‘dissociated’ or ‘sprouted,’ i.e., introduced by morphosyntactic rule in accordance with morphological well-formedness constraints, like many other agreement morphemes. We argue that the conditioning domain for node-sprouting is the syntactic phase. In contrast, our data suggest that the conditioning domain for suppletion is the complex X0, as proposed by Bobaljik (2012). We show that the ‘spanning’ hypotheses concerning exponence (Merchant 2015; Svenonius 2012), the ‘linear adjacency’ hypotheses (Embick 2010), and ‘accessibility domain’ hypothesis (Moskal 2014, 2015a, 2015b; Moskal and Smith 2016) make incorrect predictions for Korean suppletion. Finally, we argue that competition between honorific and negative suppletive exponents reveals a root-outwards effect in allomorphic conditioning, supporting the idea that insertion of vocabulary items proceeds root-outwards (Bobaljik 2000).